Ethics, Value, and Interaction: Bridging Natural and Social Histories in a Semiotic Framework

Authors

  • Joseph Julian Ziems Weiss Conservateur, Ethnologie de l’Ouest Musée canadien de l’histoire Curator, Western Ethnology Canadian Museum of History 100, rue Laurier Street, Gatineau (Québec) K1A 0M8 Tel: 819 776-8193

Abstract

A review of Webb Keane's recent Ethical Life: Its Natural and Social Histories, focusing on the use of a semiotic approach to synthesize interdisciplinary perspective on the notion of ethics.

Author Biography

Joseph Julian Ziems Weiss, Conservateur, Ethnologie de l’Ouest Musée canadien de l’histoire Curator, Western Ethnology Canadian Museum of History 100, rue Laurier Street, Gatineau (Québec) K1A 0M8 Tel: 819 776-8193

Joseph Weiss is Curator of Western Ethnology at the Canadian Museum of History. His research explores indigenous political life, Indigenous-settler relations, ethics, and the power of time, with a particular focus on the Indigenous Haida First Nation. He also maintains abiding interests in Truth and Reconciliation in Canada and research ethics in the social sciences. 

Dr. Weiss holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Chicago. His doctoral thesis, funded in part by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, examined how the members of the Haida community of Old Massett conceived of and built futures for themselves and for their settler neighbors. He is currently preparing a monograph based on this work for the University of British Columbia Press. Dr. Weiss has also collaborated with the University of Chicago and the Field Museum of Natural History on the “Open Fields Project,” examining museum-Indigenous relationships, and published with the International Journal of Canadian Studies.

References

Bahktin, Mikhail

The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Michael Holquist, ed. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Bourgois, Phillip

In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press.

Carr, E. Summerson

Scripting Addiction: The Politics of Therapeutic Talk and American Sobriety. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Goffman, Erving

The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City: Doubleday Anchor.

Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall.

Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face to Face Behavior. Garden City: Anchor Books.

Hill, Jane

The Voices of Don Gabriel: Responsibility and Self in a Modern Mexicano Narrative. In The Dialogic Emergence of Culture, Dennis Tedlock and B. Mannheim, eds. Pp. 97-147. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Hirschkind, Charles

The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics. New York: Columbia University Press.

Keane, Webb

Signs of Recognition: Powers and Hazards of Representation in an Indonesian Society. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Semiotics and the Social Analysis of Material Things. Language and Communication 23(3):409-425.

Ethical Life: Its Natural and Social Histories. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.

Sahlins, Marshall

Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities: Structure in the Early History of the Sandwhich Island Kingdoms. Michigan: University of Michigan Press.

Silverstein, Michael

Indexical Order and the Dialectics of Sociolinguistic Life. Language and Communication 23(3):193-229.

Downloads

Published

2017-03-20

Issue

Vol. 3 No. 1 (2017)

Section

Reviews

License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.